Saturday, May 3, 2008

Following Routes in GPS

A route is a course that you’re currently traveling or plan to take. In GPS terms, a route is the course between one or more waypoints. If multiple waypoints are in a route, the course between two waypoints is a leg. A single route can be made up of a number of legs.
Suppose it was a beautiful day, and you went hiking, deciding to make a loop: hike from a parking lot trailhead to a scenic waterfall, go over to a lake for some lunch on a sandy beach, and finally head cross-country until you reach a trail intersection that would take you back to your starting point at the parking lot. You’ve hiked in the area before; in fact, you’ve visited each of your planned destinations and marked them as waypoints in your GPS

receiver. However, you’ve never hiked this particular loop before, so you decide to make a route called LOOP with the following legs that you’ve already previously entered as waypoints:
PRKLOT to WTRFALL
WTRFALL to LAKE
LAKE to TRAILX
TRAILX to PRKLOT
After you create your route, the GPS receiver tells you how long each leg will be and also the total distance of the route. When you activate the route (tell the GPS receiver you’re ready to use it), this information is displayed:
  • Direction: The direction you need to travel in order to reach the next waypoint in the route
  • Distance: How far away the next waypoint is
  • Duration: How much time it’s going to take to get there After you reach a waypoint in the route, the GPS receiver automatically starts calculating the information for the next leg. This continues until you reach your final destination.
Don’t confuse a route with an autoroute, which applies to GPS receivers that can provide you with turn-by-turn street directions to a destination you’re driving to. AutoRoute is also the name of a Microsoft European street mapping program.
Routes can be created ahead of time or entered while you’re traveling. Like with waypoints, after you create a route, you can delete or edit it, including removing or adding waypoints within legs.
Whenever you’re using a route or navigating to a waypoint, you don’t need to leave your GPS receiver on all the time. You can shut it off every now and then to conserve batteries. When you turn the GPS receiver back on, just select the waypoint or route that you were using, and the GPS receiver recalculates your present position and gives you updated information about how to reach your destination.
The number of routes and the number of waypoints that a route can consist of vary from one GPS receiver to another. Some inexpensive GPS receivers don’t support routes, but a high-end consumer GPS unit might have up to 50 routes with up to 125 waypoints in each route.

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